Still keeping us safe

Royal St barracades remain locked to posts. pic.twitter.com/cGSAadl2vr

— MACCNO (@musicculture504) December 6, 2015

I really don't get it. There was a parade downtown yesterday.

They kept us safe

Can't imagine what horrors might have ensued had any suspicious persons been allowed to walk in the street rather than on the sidewalk for this four and a half block stretch during that difficult time for humanity.

The New Orleans Police Department quietly altered the French Quarter streetscape last month, stowing away the barricades that ordinarily leave much of Royal Street an open pedestrian mall during the afternoon, thronged by tourists and offering musicians and magic acts.

And with no greater fanfare, police will return Royal to normal on Saturday, putting the barricades back up and again shutting the street to traffic.

Officials say the first move was prompted by the terrorist attacks in Paris last month, combined with special events that might require easier access for first responders.

Thank you, heroes. 

Fear is excellent news for business

Let no crisis go unexploited.

In the conference call held last week, lobbyists representing a number of high-polluting industries agreed that the battle between Congress and President Obama on refugee policy will give them the cover they need to attach a legislative rider to the omnibus budget bill that rolls back newly expanded clean water regulation.
“I think that probably helps us,” one participant said, referring to the coming confrontation over refugee policy.

The White House has issued veto threats against previous attempts by Congress to block the Waters of the United States (WOTUS) rule, a regulation finalized this year that extends Clean Water Act protections to millions of acres of wetlands and streams. So attaching a rider blocking WOTUS to the omnibus was potentially going to attract a lot of attention. Until now.

Now, lawmakers are expected to attach a provision to the omnibus bill to block Syrian refugee resettlement — a move that is bound to become the focus of any government shutdown confrontation between Congress and the White House.

I'm guessing this time it was pigeon poo

And hey maybe that's explosive. But I'm not sure how suspicious it is. Are we done with these yet?

Nutty or maybe not so nutty

Not sure how reliable this ex-CIA analyst Ray McGovern is. He seems like a bit of a weirdo, honestly. But these are some eye-opening quotes nonetheless.

Which leads to the question, why would he do all these things? Why would he (Obama) be afraid for example, to take the drones away from the CIA? Well, I’ve come to the conclusion that he’s afraid. Number one, he’s afraid of what happened to Martin Luther King Jr. And I know from a good friend who was there when it happened, that at a small dinner with progressive supporters – after these progressive supporters were banging on Obama before the election, "Why don’t you do the things we thought you stood for?" Obama turned sharply and said, "Don’t you remember what happened to Martin Luther King Jr.?" That’s a quote, and that’s a very revealing quote.

I'll just restate my skepticism about "I know from a good friend who was there..."  but, even if we grant that the quote has at least a 50% chance of being made up, it still reflects some compelling analysis from a source with a fair amount of standing.

The other thing is, I’ve always been kind of shocked that when he came into office, not only did he not prosecute the torturers, the kidnapers, the people with the black [unintelligible], even the people who violated our Fourth Amendment rights, but he left them all in place. I suspected at the time, now I’m pretty convinced the president of the United States is afraid of the CIA. That’s why he got John Brennan in place. He thinks John Brennan owes more personal loyalty to him than all those other thugs out there who did the torture and so forth. That’s a questionable thing. But Obama thinks that. And that’s why he fought so hard so that Brennan would be in place.

The "afraid of CIA" stuff is a bit on the conspiracy side of the fence.  But you don't have to actually buy it to understand that the President has been enough of a "wimp" (McGovern's term) where it regards the totalitarian tendency of the U.S. security state to engender this kind of speculation.

The Bomb Robot has X-ray vision

Not that this does any good.

Lewis called the St. Bernard Sheriff's Office and deputies closed off both sides of St. Bernard Highway from Mehle to Friscoville Avenues at about 1:30 p.m. The stretch of highway wasn't reopened until around 5 p.m. Wednesday.

The Sheriff's Office sent in a bomb robot that X-rayed its contents but could not make a clear determination of what was inside. So, out of precaution, deputies took the bag to a nearby vacant lot and safety detonated it based on proper procedures.

Because the X-Ray vision cannot see through backpacks, the cops went ahead and set off an explosion... for safety. But, like I always say, you can never be too careful protecting Arabi's donut shops from disgruntled customers.

Lewis said the man had come in the last couple of days and "every day there have been some problems" with him wanting "wanting a free drink, or always something." On Wednesday, Lewis said that the man walked out without paying his check "and then he leaves a bag and it made you wonder."

In any case, finding random pieces of junk and exploding them continues to be a... um... booming business for area bomb squads and their robot friends.

NEW ORLEANS — Authorities are investigating a suspicious device found on the side of the National World War II Museum at 945 Magazine St., New Orleans police said in an email.

Officer Garry Flot said SWAT team members have the device and are trying to determine what it is. He said police used a robot to get the device.

Once they determine what the device (shower radio, bicycle tire, turkey sandwich, whatever)  might be, they plan to hold a public detonation later that afternoon along the riverfront.  Citizens may attend the celebratory safety explosion ("Boom Boom en Blanc: Flashmob with a Flash" ) for a modest fee of $40 per person which will go toward funding the NOPD consent decree reform.  If you are going, though, please leave your backpacks at home.

Update: The "mystery device" at the museum was, in fact, fireworks a "weathered" discarded bottle rocket.  So, yeah, I guess the party is definitely on, then.

Today's moment of stupid

By my count this is the sixth paranoid freak-out over a random object  laying around the metro area has seen in the past 5 days. Please stop.

Yes we Pelican move forward and resilience and some other cliche

In one short week, we will have officially re-named the basketball team and drafted some new football players.  I feel like this represents a significant turn of the corner. It's been an especially crappy sports year when even a suitcase full of paper somehow managed to befuddle the defense at the Superdome.

 At 8:20 p.m., NOPD spokesman officer Garry Flot reported that a SWAT team was on the scene and is sending in a robot to check the package. By 11:40 p.m., word came from the Police Department that the abandoned piece of luggage was full of papers, and that Poydras Street would reopen soon.

On the bright side, one imagines the police were thrilled by the opportunity to deploy the bomb robot.  They  almost never get to do that.  Would it be too much ask if we could get the robot to come out to every Saints game this year.? You know.. for security and all.. but also he could run out and fetch the kicking tee. That way we could fight terror and see something adorable all at the same time.

How stupid is it getting?

Here's how stupid.

Correction: NOPD says scene still active at 'Dome. It was in Algiers that NOPD said suspicious suitcase posed no threat. Apologies for error
— WWL-TV(@WWLTV) April 18, 2013

So that's two "suspicious suitcases" currently being freaked out about.  (Three since this morning's big fun in Mandeville.) The unattended luggage at the Superdome is currently being attended by a freaking robot.  I hope you're enjoying your day. Keep your bags close.

Paranoid America

Frankly, I'm so old now I can say from experience that none of this is worth getting worked up over.

We've seen it all before... and recently enough that it all looks like a tired remake of an old movie.  The only thing to worry about, really, is how onerous the policy response will be. Will we shut down the post office? Will it be illegal to carry a backpack? Will Tom Benson have Superdome security strip search everyone trying to sneak in a flask? 

Also box cutters

In addition to the several falsehoods  listed here that propagated after previous incidents of terror, I can add that the 9/11 hijackers did not, in fact, use box cutters as so many people continue to believe.

Myths like these often contribute to the development of unnecessary and onerous policies enacted in order that law enforcement agencies and security contractors can pretend they are "keeping us safe." It's why you couldn't take things like razor blades or shampoo on an airplane for a decade. We were only just beginning to wake from that fever dream before the Boston bombing.

Now it will be something else.  Probably you won't be required to remove your shoes before running your next marathon but it could be something as absurd. Maybe there will be a crackdown on pressure cookers. That would come at an especially bad moment for the currently "hip" kitchen appliance.

It's also worth pointing out that none of the falsehoods spread after 9/11 or the Oklahoma City bombing happened because of evil people using Twitter which, on balance, probably does more to debunk rumors than it does to spread them.

Twitter beckons us to join every compressed news cycle, to confront every rumor or falsehood, and to see everything. This is what makes the service so maddening during the meta-obsessed election season, where the stakes are unclear and the consequences abstract. And it's also what makes is so valuable during fast-moving, decidedly real disasters. Twitter is a fact-processing machine on a grand scale, propagating then destroying rumors at a neck-snapping pace. To dwell on the obnoxiousness of the noise is to miss the result: that we end up with more facts, sooner, with less ambiguity.

 So naturally the thing to do is shut it off.

Police shut down cellphone service in the Boston area on Monday to prevent remote detonations of explosives, according to the Associated Press.

The Boston Police Department did not respond to a request to comment.

At least 2 people were killed and 23 were injured in explosions at the finish line of the Boston Marathon, according to police.

Just a few years ago the President was asking Congress for the authority to kill the internet in the case of an emergency such as civic unrest or... undefined... something like this, maybe.  The Mubarak government in Egypt appears to have implemented just such a strategy prior to its toppling.  Apparently the response to the Boston bombing involved something like a "kill switch." 

New Orleans, as we all know, is home to more than its share of heavily concentrated outdoor gatherings. To my great consternation, I didn't have enough free time to get out to this year's French Quarter Festival.  According to a dubious counting system, my absence didn't prevent the fest from drawing over half a million participants. Maybe it wasn't actually that many but.. it was a lot of people.


FQF 2008. (I don't have a photo of this year's because I wasn't there. Yeah, I'm a little bitter.)

If I had been down there, though, and God forbid something frightening had happened... like maybe a low flying helicopter or something... I and many others would have benefited from a fast and convenient way to get a handle on what was happening so we could make informed decisions about how to react. In fact, it's difficult to imagine a more panic-escalating move authorities could make in such a situation than the simultaneous disabling of everyone's communication device.

But it's precisely the sort of decision made by people who can't imagine Twitter being useful for things other than just trying to make it into this week's Y@ Speak. Maybe if they'd  use less imagination on impractical and unlikely uses for box cutters this sort of thing wouldn't happen.

Caramel Macchiato

Should be a new threat level unto itself.

So the U.S. Government believes it may have “legal authority” to compel Twitter to close accounts. From where does that authority derive? Presumably, the Obama administration could consider Twitter’s providing of a forum to a designated Terrorist organization to constitute the crime of “material support of Terrorism.” That raises a variety of questions: is the NYT guilty of that crime by quoting some of those tweets and promoting the account (since the first NYT article was published, the number of people following @HSMPress has significantly increased and is almost certain to increase more as a result of today’s article). Can one be guilty of that crime if one re-tweets any of their messages? How about if one defends their right to have a Twitter account?